At the end of the 16th century, Charles IX had a royal hunting lodge on the site transformed into a small château for Marguerite de Valois (popularly known as Reine Margot), the first wife of Henry IV. Although their marriage was always rocky and eventually annulled, they became friends late in life and she was able to return to Paris and set up house in the château. Marguerite bequeathed her château to the little Dauphin, later Louis XIII, in 1606.

From 1606 to 1792, the property remained part of the royal estates. In 1716, the château became the home of the Duchesse de Berry, Marie Louise Elisabeth d'Orléans, daughter of the Duc d'Orléans, Regent of France. Antoine Watteau decorated the rooms with chinoiserie. Tsar Peter the Great of Russia visited her here. When welcoming the Russian emperor, the Duchess appeared "stout as a tower" (“puissante comme une tour”).[1] The royal princess had been nicknamed “Joufflotte” (“chubby”) because of her generous proportions. By the spring of 1717, her increasing corpulence had begun to cause her serious inconvenience so that she had given up hunting and sold her saddle-horses. But the prodigious quantities of food she devoured, washed down with champagne and strong liquors, were not the main cause for her enormous girth. Although a widow since 1714, the princess was visibly pregnant. Early July, Madame de Berry, who by then kept fully secluded in her castle at La Muette, was being “inconvenienced”, “having grown so big” that it was feared for her life ! By the end of July, the Duchess had recovered but she had been in critical condition a few days earlier when giving birth[2]... Which is why two months earlier, the princess, already quite heavy with child, had seemed "stout as a tower" in presence of Peter the Great. This clandestine pregnancy was really an open secret and had been widely gosspied about. Arouet (Voltaire) was arrested in May 1717 after telling to a police informer that the Regent's daughter had retired to La Muette to wait for the time of her delivery.[3] After the death of her husband in 1714 and of the Sun King in 1715, the princess was said to have lost "all semblance of restrain in her quest for lustful pleasures". In January 1716, she had secretly borne a girl at her Luxembourg palace. Satirical songs had then lampooned her licentious amours.[4] Unable to recover from a difficult delivery, the Duchess expired on 21 July 1719 in the château de la Muette [5]

On the Duchesse de Berry's death in 1719, the château passed to the nine-year-old king, Louis XV. The king used the château to entertain his mistresses, including the three de Nesle sisters, Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry.

Louis XV had the château entirely rebuilt by the architects Jacques V Gabriel and Ange-Jacques Gabriel between 1741 and 1745. The new, much larger, building was flanked by two large wings with many smaller outlying buildings. The Dauphin, later King Louis XVI, took possession of La Muette in 1764, and his future wife, Marie-Antoinette, lodged there on her arrival in France.

Louis XVI is said to have spent the happiest days of his life at the château with his young bride, although they had no knowledge of sexual matters and thus did not have children for seven years. During this period Louis abolished certain royal taxes, and he opened the gates of the Bois de Boulogne to the populace. The Emperor Joseph II, Marie-Antoinette's brother (travelling incognito under the name of "Count Falkenstein") visited the couple here in April 1777.

Louis granted a small area of sandy ground of the château's estate at les Sablons (near les Sablons metro station) to Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1737–1813) to demonstrate the growing of potatoes, which had not previously been considered in Europe, other than in Ireland, as safe for human consumption. Indeed, they were considered to be a source of leprosy among other things. Parmentier carried out a series of publicity stunts, which led to the acceptance of potatoes in France and then throughout Europe.

The château, together with the Château de Madrid and other properties, were put on sale in February 1788, with a view to demolition. The castle fell into disrepair, and the main building was demolished in 1793.

The first manned flight commenced from the château on 21 November 1783, with a hot air balloon manufactured by the Montgolfier brothers lifting off from the garden of La Muette carrying Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes. Among the crowd who observed this feat were the royal family and Benjamin Franklin. They flew for 25 minutes, travelling almost 300 metres above Paris and covering a distance of about nine kilometres, before landing between the windmills on the Butte-aux-Cailles. Enough fuel remained on board at the end of the flight to have allowed the balloon to fly four to five times as far. However, burning embers from the fire were scorching the balloon fabric and had to be extinguished with sponges, and so the pilots decided to land as soon as they were over open countryside.

During the French Revolution, the Château de la Muette became state property. The property was split up into several lots and sold at auction. The château returned to the royal family in 1816. One wing was given to the Minister for Finance, Louis Emmanuel Corvetto. The other wing, and most of the grounds, were purchased in 1820 by Sébastien Érard, who manufactured pianos used by Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt. In 1821, Sébastien Érard invented the double escapement action, which permitted a note to be repeated even if the key had not yet risen to its maximum vertical position, a great benefit for rapid playing.

In 1912, the château's then owner, the Franqueville family, sold much of the remaining property, and the former estate developed into a fashionable residential area.

Two large lots were sold to Baron Henri James de Rothschild, who built a new château in 1921 and 1922 as his Paris residence to a 19th-century design by Lucien Hesse. By the beginning of World War II, the old château had been completely demolished and replaced by mansions.

^Berry had almost died while being delivered of a still-born daughter on 2 April at the Luxembourg palace. She didn't recover from her excruciating delivery but quickly fell pregnant again, as shown by her autopsy. Berry's premature end is vividly described in The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon on the reign of Louis XIV and the Regency, chapter XXIII, pp. 206-220.